Book Review: The Old Farmer's Almanac Garden-Fresh Cookbook

The Old Farmer's Almanac Garden-Fresh Cookbook contains over 340 recipes. These include both new and classic recipes that are well organized by course from breakfast and brunch to entrees, desserts, and beverages. This book also includes extensive selections on specialized gardening techniques including how to grow kitchen herb gardens, vegetable gardens, edible flower gardens, and berry gardens. Finally, in the tradition of the Old Farmer's Almanac, the Garden-Fresh Cookbook also includes a valuable reference section complete with growing season information, nutritional reference material, substitution techniques for common ingredients, and other reference material helpful in the kitchen.

So far, I have tried two recipes from this book. Both were complete, easy to prepare, healthy, and most importantly - delicious. The two recipes that I chose were the German Potato Casserole and the Portuguese Skillet Haddock. I really liked the German Potato Casserole recipe and the combination of potatoes and rutabaga. This was the first time that I had ever used rutabaga and it tasted great with the potatoes. I also liked the Portuguese dish because it is a good base recipe that can be used with many varieties of white fish.

In addition to the recipes, the Garden Fresh Cookbook also provides many helpful hints that you can use in the kitchen. For example, next to the Portuguese Haddock recipe there is a tip for ridding the kitchen of odor after cooking fish by adding whole cloves, cinnamon sticks, allspice, or lemon slices to a pan of water and simmering it.

It is no wonder that the people at the Old Farmer's Almanac have put together such a useful, well organized, collection of recipes and reference materials. They have been publishing almanacs packed with similar, valuable information since 1792!! If you enjoy cooking with natural, healthy ingredients and if you like gardening, this is THE book for you.